Welcome To Droneworld

It should come as a surprise to nobody any more how quickly and how easily the institutions of a democratic republic can transform themselves under the spell of the conjuring words of the national-security state. It was the dark force implicit in self-government because self-government depended upon human beings, who are easily terrified by every rustling in the bushes and every branch against the window. It was the dark force dreaded most by the authors of the Constitution, because they knew what people were like, and they knew how deeply embedded was the need for something like a king even among the people who'd just booted one off the continent. They feared it even worse than they feared theocracy. So they did what they could to keep it in check. They lodged the war powers in the national legislature, rather than in the executive branch. They lodged the power to pay for a war in the same place, because they knew what a single national leader could do with both the public purse and an army at his disposal. In 1793, Mr. Madison made it quite clear what they meant to do, and why.

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man; not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

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Through the years, this was honored primarily in the breach. Thomas Jefferson — with Madison himself as Secretary Of State — had a fleet halfway to Africa before he told Congress he was going after the Barbary Pirates. James Polk launched the Mexican Land Grab pretty much on his own, and other presidents felt free to dispatch troops all over the globe on flimsy extra-constitutional rationales. What did we learn from Vietnam? Kill enough people to win, that's what. Undeclared war became the rule, and not the exception. And then The Bomb came along, and blew everything all to hell.

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At the very least, in those previous exercises of extra-constitutional presidential war powers, there was substantial public debate. Abraham Lincoln railed at Polk. Mark Twain was so caustic about our campaigns in the Philippines that his writings of that time almost have vanished from the consideration of his work. What The Bomb did was twofold. First, it changed the default position generally in our politics to acquiescence in the face of secrecy as regards what our government was doing in the areas of national defense and national security, and almost every institution that was supposed to hold the government accountable to the people — the Congress, the press, the people themselves — went along for the ride. Second, because those institutions so thoroughly failed in their proper democratic functions, they were replaced in the public mind by faceless fears, paranoid abandon, everything else that populates the Id of the democratic political imagination. This produced some great art — Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, Seven Days In May, — but some lousy politics, as the careers of hundreds of blacklisted actors will attest.

Droneworld, where we all live today, is simply the latest manifestation of these phenomena. Despite the recent revelations, and despite what ought to be a pretty entertaining confirmation hearing for John Brennan tomorrow, acquiescence to the demands of national security in the war on terror has been as rigidly the rule among our democratic institutions as it ever was during the Cold War. It was revealed that major news organizations sat on stories at the behest of the national-security apparatus of the government. (Please note in that same story that even the internal debates over the policies must remain secret. We are not even allowed to know what qualms our leaders had initiating policies that we were not allowed to know about. This is no way to run a democracy.) The congressional oversight is simply laughable, as Rep. Mike Rogers explains:

I review all of the air strikes that we use under this title of the law," he told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. Rogers added that Americans who decide to join al-Qaeda become enemies of the U.S. "If you have someone who has joined this organization, and they may not be engaged in plot a today, but part of an organization plotting to kill Americans, and so they've joined the enemy. So you don't just kill the enemy when they're at the gate." Rogers insisted there is not a long list of Americans on any "kill list." "I can candidly tell you that," he said.

And why, exactly, should we believe that, Mike? Do you seriously expect us to believe that, if a drone strike went bad, and killed an American who was just in the neighborhood buying falafel, you'd be the one out there raising holy hell about it, thereby endangering your re-election chances and your security clearance? Honky, please.

Look at me. I don't even trust good ol' Congressman Mike Rogers there, the pride of Livingston County, and I don't even have a bunker or a crystal set. Imagine what people with more tinfoil in their hats than I have are thinking right now. It is now beyond cliche to observe that government secrecy "breeds distrust" in our institutions. What is never mentioned is that, if you breed enough distrust in the institutions — or, more to the point, if the activities of the institutions breed distrust in themselves — the trust people once placed in them has to go somewhere. And, generally, it goes into dreams and schemes and circus clowns that the people dream up themselves. The very real use of drones, and the very real possibility that they will be in general use in domestic law-enforcement before very long, because we're more than already halfway there now, already have combined to set the paranoid imagination fully a'bloom. Government secrecy and deception blurs the line between genuine fears over the decline of civil liberties, and the wild-assed fantasies of the black-helicopter crowd. If you want to see the true destructive power of Droneworld in this country, look deeply into the Id of the democratic political imagination. There are angry, feral creatures in there, stalking the ruins, howling for blood.